


remember what you know:

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: hail solitude, friend of the friendless [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Isolation, Pre-Canon, Slowly getting into the cosmic horror theology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-09-28 13:24:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17183822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: Some people are already orphans or survivors, but no one's exempt from being left.





	remember what you know:

> Practice during exams even though it will take a bite out of your marks. Practice like it is an exam. Practice knowing. The proctor is there, and here are a dozen others struggling with molecular biology same as you. Prove you know this. Keep proving it.
> 
> Practice until it’s automatic, then keep proving it _is_ automatic. Look at the fact that your marks barely take a hit at all. Call that your proof. Keep it up.

* * *

Everyone hates cell and molec, anyway.

* * *

There is a cluster of people commiserating after one of their crueler collective face-offs with more things too small to see and too damned large to memorize. Evan honestly wants to join them; there are few icebreakers better than a common enemy that isn’t actually a person, nor a threat.

He wants to go. (Nothing he does alone is helping, maybe studying with others will. They seem to think so, and they have the practice.) He _should_ go, maybe.

He doesn’t.

* * *

> Look for the people who could be with others and aren’t.
> 
> (Don’t pity them. Don’t make it obvious. Just give them an excuse.)

* * *

“So… do you have any idea what was supposed to be going on in there?”

* * *

“Yeah, frankly, that’s probably still more than I’ve got going for me, I can’t judge.”

* * *

 

“Okay. Want to be lost together?”

* * *

> Keep giving them an excuse — fake it, only sometimes, when you have to. What matters is the result; that’s the only thing that’s real.

* * *

It turns out Evan’s better than he knew at feigning incomprehension — which honestly feels like a bit of an own goal, maybe? But that’s all right — or rather at feigning sudden, _new_ incomprehension. He can conveniently manage to be stuck on just the material a friend’s finally comfortably at ease with, whether or not he actually was. What matters is the moment after a breakthrough, where they believe they have something to give that barely costs them, finding the many ways to spark that; seeing that the belief lingers longer every time. It’s just practice.

After a while it turns out most people Evan knows in any kind of meaningful way have small families, no family — whether by their choice or another’s — or only the loosest grasp, from his perspective, of the concept. It’s not that he’s doing it on purpose, or even that there’s any meaningful comfort found in the more-or-less shared experience. It just sort of happens.

The alternative is a question of attrition, a small one, one of many, that result by definition when people can’t not let it: the more someone else expects an unspoken common ground where they find empty space, the more reasons they have to leave. The casual, trusting way most people seem to treat the idea of relatives is no exception but for the fact that it’s _more_ reliable as a source of alienation, even if the amount is small. That particular surprise and reconfiguration of expectations for the person on the humanly normal side of things is always a little lurch of not just incomprehension or pity but of _that-could-be-me_ , even if it’s usually below their notice, even if it’s far from enough to produce any kind of broken heart or mere dislike. That anyone could die or leave and the people they love have lives in which they’re getting older, the kind of thing anyone with someone to know it about spends the day sure they forget.

It’s not really noticeable to _anyone_ , Evan’s fairly sure — save the obvious — but it doesn’t have to be, doesn’t have to be consciously known by the people whose casual attempts at friendship make half the world think about loss they ignore and not to the people doing the thinking. Not like people go around segregated by family size and cordiality or anything, not like it’s as decisive as someone mouthing off about — well. (Politics, and personhood, and the kind of thing that’s just damned _petty_ as well as ugly; it’s odd to think there’s a kind of loss he was sheltered from until recently and he’s always a bit jarred by it still. He hates overhearing people fight and he’s never gotten used to the idea and that’s something not held in common, too, so he has to handle it on his own.)

But the thing in question is _just_ that little bit of a skip between you and someone else, the kind of thing that adds up. Every little barrier matters; of course people go more easily to wherever such things aren’t; he’s pretty sure humanity would’ve died out as a species if a person had to do that basic of self-preservation on purpose to pull it off.

It takes trial and error for Evan to apply knowing this to himself, though. It doesn’t occur to him naturally at any point in the process. He doesn’t think to make his family a secret — the idea is laughable, for one thing, and given who does have reason to know in the first place if he wanted to he’d probably already be dead, and he’s profoundly disinterested for his own sake besides — and it would be hard to try, given how many ways they have been all he has. He would lose entirely the ability to talk about _anything_ in his entire life before university, just about, if it had occurred to him to try. So they come up plenty.

It’s just that he doesn’t like to give the wrong impression, whatever he does, and it took a while to find the pattern. It really is subtle. But:

“Oh, you must be really close, that’s so nice,” or any of its cousins in segue, whether envious or wistful or dubious at the edges or comfortably identical to what they think they’re speaking to. And:

“No, not really — not at all, actually,” and then clarifying; discovering there is no good way to do so. Taking far too long to work that out, in fact: the mourning awkwardness and occasional preaching of _We’re estranged,_ the dead silence or sharp nosiness brought on with _We kind of don’t get along._

The truth, from the right angle and _only_ from the right angle, turns out to be easiest to work with after all. But that takes absolutely forever to realize, and the experience is odd all the way through; because what gets him the _worst_ reactions altogether, the closest to conscious fear and the closest to universally-elicited both, is also the truth, just put the way that comes naturally. _We were. We’re not any more._

_No, we don’t talk._

_Nothing like that. No, they didn’t do anything, not really._

_I left._

(Once, to someone who kept asking, because he had too much else to process when everything was new to work out what she was actually, clumsily trying to uncover until the morning after: _I mean, no? Not really, no, why would I? They do miss me, I think, though, it’s… loud._ That’s the kind of thing you _really_ only admit once. Everyone makes mistakes their first week away from home, though, Evan’s figured, many worse with fewer excuses; he’s all right.)

And he _does_ work it out, obviously, that whether sublimated or not that momentary jarring is closest in kind to sudden alienation. Because most people can’t do that, apparently, or they think that they couldn’t, or they’ve never pulled it off. Not managed to walk away like that and still think out loud of the people in question, painlessly and kindly and often. Something in them flounders, it’s only a question of how much.

How much and where toward, he supposes. Frequently it’s about whether anyone could and Evan in particular _would_ do something like that to them, when they’ve already decided without thinking about it that it isn’t what they’d want.

(People like Evan. He’d be a pretty awful person not to notice, really. And people want to believe, when they like someone: that they’re both of the same species of thing and living on the same level plane; that affairs they understand and like in this context will continue; that they can anticipate the future. That the world makes sense and — just automatically, as a subset of wanting to any extent, so often brief and in passing — not anything fanciful or dramatic — that the object of whatever fondness the person feels will stay to harbor it, so the giver won’t be left holding the feeling themselves with nothing to do but look it over, closely, actually live with seeing what having wanted a person’s company means. That _they_ mean something.)

Evan does work this out in what’s more or less decent time, given how much of an uphill battle it is. He thinks: if he wants to get anywhere, he’s going to need people to stop looking at him like—

(Either he’s something valuable around which they should blunt the impact of that meaning with fear, or they’re going to need some route to diminish him by. He knows how this brings out in turn an awareness of how much easier it could be to, instead of liking a near-stranger who could easily mean nothing to them tomorrow, just want to be alone. How much easier it _would_ be, wanting that, were it not for that the overdue wondering who among the meaningful _would_ leave them for the sake of it would stick. Knowing that curiosity would eventually be their companion, whether the process of it comes to the forefront of their minds where it was already looking for an in or just casts the faintest, smallest new shadow at the back. And no matter what, it’s certainly always recognizable on Evan’s part, and if it’s not perfectly ubiquitous it still wins out in prevalence by a landslide. Some people are already orphans or survivors, but no one’s exempt from being left)

— _that_.

It takes him much longer, once he knows exactly what he’s doing, to stop.

* * *

He gets there. He makes sure of it.


End file.
